Jeff Fountain

Jeff Fountain

Jeff Fountain and his wife Romkje are the initiators of the Schuman Centre for European Studies. They moved to Amsterdam in December 2017 after living in the Dutch countryside for over 40 years engaged with the YWAM Heidebeek training centre. Romkje was founder of YWAM The Netherlands and chaired the national board until 2013. Jeff was YWAM Europe director for 20 years, until 2009. Jeff chaired the annual Hope for Europe Round Table until 2015, while Romkje chaired the Women in Leadership network until recently. Jeff is author of Living as People of HopeDeeply Rooted and other titles, and also writes weekly word, a weekly column on issues relating to Europe.

Articles by Jeff Fountain

  • Europe

    Searching for truth

    The stubborn myth that science and faith are diametrically opposed gets knocked about in the current exhibition on ‘the creation of science’ in the Catherijne Convent Museum I visited in Utrecht this week.

  • Europe

    Zelensky’s prayerlist

    Easter, 2022, two months after the Russian invasion began, Volodymyr Zelensky led his nation in prayer for Ukraine from the St Sophia’s Cathedral in Kyiv in a pre-recorded video.

  • Europe

    How Long, O Lord?

    Few of us imagined that the Ukrainian resistance would last long against the feared might of the Russian army. Memories were stirred of the German invasion of the Netherlands in 1940 when the vastly outnumbered Dutch army resisted for four days before surrendering on May 14, immediately after Hitler’s ruthless blitzkrieg destroyed the historic heart of Rotterdam.

  • Europe

    The sledgehammer of truth

    While praying for Ukraine this week in a zoom connection with YWAM colleagues, I remembered a story once told by the late Argentinian-born evangelist Luis Palau. 

  • Europe

    Bound together

    A giant three-metre-high replica of an ordinary torsion spring clothespeg arrested my wife and me while walking through a sculpture garden in New Zealand some time ago. 

  • Europe

    Cheering them on!

    Olga is a survivor. The first time she escaped death was before she was even born. She was a Chernobyl baby. That is, her mother gave birth to her soon after the world’s worst nuclear disaster occurred in Chernobyl in 1986, just 40 kilometres north of Kyiv, close to the Belarusian border. After the reactor of the nuclear power plant exploded, pregnant mothers in Ukraine were ordered to abort their babies. They were told the babies would all be deformed. But Olga’s mother, who lived 400 kilometre

  • Europe

    Openness and hospitality

    Today, January 6, is the 12th day of Christmas in the traditional church calendar, the official end to Christmastide and the start of Epiphany, which lasts through to the day before Lent. 

  • Europe

    No Christmas in Bethlehem

    Five hundred hushed participants at the European Parliament Prayer Breakfast in Brussels last Wednesday listened intently as Palestinian Christian leader, Dr Jack Sara, told of the sense of hopelessness and wanton destruction that followed in the wake of the October 7 terrorist attack on Israel. 

  • Europe

    Three blind spots

    Politicians, diplomats and intercessors from the Nordic and Baltic nations gathered in Helsinki for a prayer breakfast near the Finnish parliament on Friday morning this week. 

  • Europe

    Glimpsing Brussels

    Early this week I tagged along with a group of thirty Dutch visitors to Brussels on a walking tour of the European sector led by two experienced Dutch journalists, Bert and Tijn.